Prepare for study in speech and language processing

Unlike the other courses, this one mostly contains external material to help you prepare for study in the exciting area of speech and language processing.

This material is designed for preparing to study at Masters level (including PhD students who take Masters courses as part of their programme) and is aimed at students from a wide range of backgrounds, whether you consider yourself to be a linguist, computer scientist, mathematician, cognitive scientist, engineer, or from any other related discipline. The beauty of speech and language processing is that all of these disciplines have something to contribute, and none of them are enough on their own.

Your goal? To become an interdisciplinary expert!

Where to start? Well, it depends on your background, so the way to use this course is to follow it through in the suggested order, skipping over material that you already know.

  • Get the book

    There is a comprehensive textbook that gives a great introduction to this area, by Jurafsky and Martin.

  • Think like a linguist

    If you're coming from a Linguistics background, then spend a moment or two checking your understanding of some basic ideas. If you've never studied Linguistics, then this is the place to start.

  • Think like a computer scientist

    To put our Linguistic knowledge and intuitions into practice, we have to translate linguistic concepts into data structures that can then be operated on by an algorithm.

  • Brush up your mathematics

    Mathematics is just a tool, but an essential one. If you find the notation a barrier, then let's do something about that right away...

  • Think like an engineer

    You've taken your intuitions about language, described them as algorithms operating on data structures, and now you need to make them work: time for some engineering...